30 March 2016

Gaffes like the one highlighted above occur when a style guide (in this case Reuters news service) requires that references to "the queen" be capitalized and her name given in full, and when a 'bot proceeds to check and autocorrect styles before publication.A tip of the blogging hat to John Farrier who found this and posted it at Neatorama.

I'm trying to minimize coverage of politics during this election cycle, but I thought this article in The Village Voice offers some insight into both a candidate and a religion:

Commentators who had previously criticized Sanders for downplaying
his Judaism were underwhelmed by his mostly secular response. "Sanders
may be focused on uniting Americans for a better future," argued the
Jewish Telegraphic Agency newswire, "but some Jews would clearly like to
hear him acknowledge his past."

Those Jews were eventually given voice through the unlikely agency of
Anderson Cooper, who, during a March debate in Michigan, referred to
Jewish leaders who were "disappointed" that Sanders keeps his Judaism
"in the background." "Look, my father's family was wiped out by Hitler
in the Holocaust," came Sanders's reply. "I am very proud of being
Jewish, and that is an essential part of who I am as a human being."
Finally, Sanders was giving commentators what they seemed to want to
hear from a Jewish candidate — a reference to the Holocaust. Vox's Zack Beauchamp said the response "nearly brought me to tears."

We
shouldn't be surprised by this insistence that Bernie invoke the
Holocaust: Museums, school curricula, and the culture generally have so
diligently cultivated the image of Jews as primarily survivors or
victims of the Holocaust that we've learned to see this, and not all
that solidarity talk, as properly Jewish. But Sanders carries on a
Jewish tradition much longer, and more sacred, than merely paying lip
service to the Holocaust. His every utterance about universal health
care, economic inequality, and social justice relentlessly embraces
Judaism; it's just a Judaism many people no longer recognize. Bernie
Sanders is a Jew of a different era — the kind of Jew that Zionists
would very much like us to forget...

When pundits complain that Sanders is not being publicly Jewish enough,
what they are really complaining about is his refusal to fall in line
with the philosophy that has come to define Jewish life in America. They
are disappointed that Sanders has not aligned himself with Zionism...

And yet it is the non-Zionist Sanders who is criticized for
insufficient faith, even as wealthy right-wing Zionists ostentatiously
parade their donations to Holocaust Museums and prestigious
congregations. These gestures are supposed to fulfill the sort of public
obligation Judaism imposes, but next to Bernie Sanders's dogged
agitation for universal equality and justice, decade in and decade out,
Zionist chest-thumping looks like a cheap substitute.

This
contrast was at its starkest when Sanders declined the opportunity to
join every other presidential candidate in addressing Zionism's most
exalted assembly: the annual convention of the American Israel Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Instead, he addressed the question of Israel
at a high school in Salt Lake City, Utah, in a speech that included such
taboo-breaking observations as "There is too much suffering in Gaza to
be ignored."

Such heresy reminds us of an earlier Judaism. When
Sanders says, "We are living in a world which worships not love of
brothers and sisters, not love of the poor and the sick, but worships
the acquisition of money," he is not hiding his religion, but espousing
it. He is evangelizing. And if his gospel is going to catch, it will
most likely be among the young people who have flocked to his campaign.

29 March 2016

Birds are typically depicted inaccurately in Hollywood movies. There is a legal reason for that: "Casting native species is against the law. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act,
federal law since 1918, prohibits the possession of migratory birds for
commercial purposes, and that includes keeping domestic bird
species for use as animal actors." (so tropical or foreign birds are used instead)

How to manage mail for the deceased. Not explained at the link is that if the deceased was a resident in a care facility (group home etc) that did not have individual mailboxes for each resident, you cannot submit a change of address form to the USPS. You have to contact each sender individually.

"Tracy Warshal, 39, noticed the man behind her in line at an Aldi
supermarket was shuffling around looking for his wallet, she told ABC
News. Realizing he'd forgotten it, Warshal offered to pay for his $7 grocery bill." (with an interesting result...)

An alternative explanation for the Biblical virgin birth predicates a mistranslation.

"...former corporate raider Asher Edelman says Bernie Sanders is the
strongest presidential candidate. Appearing on CNBC’s “Fast Money” this
morning, Edelman responded immediately when asked who he thought the best candidate for the economy would be. “Bernie Sanders,” Edelman said, without missing a beat. “No question.”" (video at the link)

"In May of 1940, as French forces crumpled
in the face of the Nazi onslaught and the British anxiously scanned the
skies for signs of the dreaded invasion, the newly installed prime
minister was preoccupied with another pressing problem. Where would he
get the money to pay his bill from the shirtmaker? Britain’s predicament
was dire, but so was Winston Churchill’s. He owed not just the
shirtmaker, but the watchmaker, the wine merchants, and the printers as
well. He was overdrawn at the bank, he owed interest payments on his
debts, his taxes were conspicuously late, and his publishers were
clamoring for an overdue book on which he had taken a large advance. Churchill would lead Britain through the Blitz a few months later, but first he needed money..."

An op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times posits that doctors and clinics shouldn't sell drugs: "The way Medicare pays for prescription drugs gives doctors an incentive
to choose the most expensive alternatives, and gives drug makers an
incentive to raise prices relentlessly. In other words, the system works
for doctors and pharmaceutical companies at the expense of everyone
else. Eliminating such perverse incentives
without reducing the quality of care is crucial to slowing the
unsustainable growth of health care costs...."

Here's the best article I've read this year about the recent evolution of the Republican Party. It was published a couple months ago when there were more contenders, but that's not important. The author has a good grasp of recent Republican party developments, because he was formerly a speechwriter for George W. Bush. The article isn't written in favor of (or against) any particular current candidate.

Fabulous Oldies is a website that collects and preserves biographical snippets about older people.

MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: ... I'm in
love with a lady of great quality, and I wish that you would help me
write something to her in a little note that I will let fall at her
feet...PHILOSOPHY MASTER: Is it verse that you wish to write her?M.J. : No, no. No verse.PH. M: Do you want only prose?M.J. : No, I don't want either prose or verse.PH. M: It must be one or the other.M.J. : Why?PH. M: Because, sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse.M.J. : There is nothing but prose or verse?PH. M: No, sir, everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose.M.J. : And when one speaks, what is that then?PH. M: Prose.M.J. : What! When I say, "Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my nightcap," that's prose?PH. M: Yes, Sir.M.J. : By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking
prose without knowing anything about it, and I am much obliged to you
for having taught me that.

Voltaire, writing to Catherine the Great:

"I am not
like a lady of the court of Versailles who said 'what a dreadful pity
that the bother at the Tower of Babel should have got language all mixed
up; but for that, everyone would always have spoken French'."

And this from The Onion:

Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia

Cities of Sjlbvdnzv, Grzny to Be First Recipients

Before an emergency joint session of Congress yesterday, President
Clinton announced US plans to deploy over 75,000 vowels to the war-torn
region of Bosnia. The deployment, the largest of its kind in American
history, will provide the region with the critically needed letters
A,E,I,O and U, and is hoped to render countless Bosnian names more
pronounceable.

"For six years, we have stood by while names like Ygrjvslhv and Tzlynhr
and Glrm have been horribly butchered by millions around the world,"
Clinton said. "Today, the United States must finally stand up and say
'Enough.' It is time the people of Bosnia finally had some vowels in
their incomprehensible words...

The deployment, dubbed Operation Vowel Storm by the State Department, is
set for early next week, with the Adriatic port cities of Sjlbvdnzv and
Grzny slated to be the first recipients...

Citizens of Grzny and Sjlbvdnzv eagerly await the arrival of the
vowels. "My God, I do not think we can last another day," Trszg
Grzdnjkln, 44, said. "I have six children and none of them has a name
that is understandable to me or to anyone else...

Said Sjlbvdnzv resident Grg Hmphrs, 67: "With just a few key letters, I
could be George Humphries. This is my dream."

The airdrop represents the largest deployment of any letter to a foreign
country since 1984. During the summer of that year, the US shipped
92,000 consonants to Ethiopia, providing cities like Ouaouoaua,
Eaoiiuae, and Aao with vital, life-giving supplies of L's, S's and T's.

I found these three anecdotes while skimming through Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language.

Potoooooooo or Pot-8-Os... was a famous 18th-century Thoroughbred racehorse, known for his defeat of some of the greatest racehorses of the time and his later life as an influential sire...

Pot-8-Os acquired the strangespelling of his nickname through a transliteration error, when a stable lad was asked to write the original name, "Potatoes", on a feed bin. The lad's version, Potoooooooo, was said to amuse his lordship so he kept it, and it appears in the General Stud Book.

There must be other names that could be reconfigured in a similar manner. CCCPO (or would it be CPPPO?) comes to mind. Readers can undoubtedly come up with others.

Today I learned: "The term [Thoroughbred] is a proper noun referring to this specific breed, though often not capitalized, especially in non-specialist publications, and outside the US."

27 March 2016

This map of Jupiter is the most detailed global color map of the planet
ever produced. The round map is a polar stereographic projection that
shows the south pole in the center of the map and the equator at the
edge. It was constructed from images taken by Cassini on Dec. 11 and 12,
2000, as the spacecraft neared Jupiter during a flyby on its way to
Saturn.

The map shows a variety of colorful cloud features, including parallel
reddish-brown and white bands, the Great Red Spot, multi-lobed chaotic
regions, white ovals and many small vortices. Many clouds appear in
streaks and waves due to continual stretching and folding by Jupiter's
winds and turbulence. The bluish-gray features along the north edge of
the central bright band are equatorial "hot spots," meteorological
systems such as the one entered by NASA's Galileo probe. Small bright
spots within the orange band north of the equator are lightning-bearing
thunderstorms. The polar region shown here is less clearly visible
because Cassini viewed it at an angle and through thicker atmospheric
haze.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

That's almost as cool as Saturn's north pole, which features the famous rotating hexagon:

A tip of my blogging hat to reader Dan Noland, for his observation that this young woman is attending a dB drag racing event:

dB drag racing is a competition rewarding the person who can produce the loudest sound inside a vehicle. The "dB" means decibels of sound pressure level (SPL). In these competitions, SPL of 155 dB can be reached, and it is not unheard of to hear more than 160 dB as well.

Competitive vehicles can range from a small vehicle with a single amplifier and subwoofer
up to a large van with dozens of amplifiers and subwoofers powered by
dozens of car batteries and with upgraded electrical wiring and
alternator...

During a competition, the vehicle must be driven 20 feet. Nobody is
allowed to sit in the vehicle during trials because injury would be
certain. The vehicles are sealed tight to maximize containment of the
sound energy for the decibel level meter. The competitor stands away
from the vehicle with an on/off switch control while a computer voice
announces the stages for the "races"...

This would be a good time to quote Miranda:

O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in't!

The Telegraph reports that the word "Easter" has been quietly deleted from the names of certain chocolate eggs...

Growing numbers of chocolate eggs are on sale
in the UK without any mention of the word “Easter” on the front of the
packaging.

Many of Britain’s best
known brands have quietly dropped the name of the Christian festival
from their main branding, now selling Easter products labelled simply as
“chocolate egg” or even “egg”, it has been claimed.

The allegation was highlighted by the makers of the “Real Easter Egg”, a fair trade chocolate product which carries a Christian messageinstead of pictures of bunnies and chicks and donates its profits to charity.

The Meaningful Chocolate Company, based in Manchester, was set up
six years ago in an attempt to reintroduce Easter eggs with references
to the Easter story and Advent calendars featuring nativity scenes to
the mainstream market.

But since then, according to the
company’s founder David Marshall, the secularising trend has been gone
further, with many products now seemingly dropping references to Easter
from the title altogether.

I have difficulty getting a grasp of the theological arguments of Christians who protest the non-use of "Easter" on candy.

Until recently, eating dog had never been a big thing in Cambodia in the
way that it is in other East Asian countries like Vietnam, China and
Korea. Now, however, more and more Cambodians appear to crave this
controversial meat...

"It’s become very popular, especially here in Phnom Penh" says
Pheakadey, who owns one of the alley’s dog joints. ”It’s very delicious,
and it also has some medicinal qualities. It’s good for the man’s
virility.”

One can't help but notice the similarity with the use of rhino or tiger derivatives for "virility."

Along with the Cambodian appetite for dogs, a black market of stolen pets and street dogs has emerged. "We buy some of our dogs from the dog thieves” Pheakadey admits. ”Every day we have people bring us stolen dogs.”

Trigger warning: if you love dogs, don't go to the source article to read about how the dogs are captured and killed.

The US economy keeps expanding and the population keeps growing. But we actually use less
water now for all purposes than we did back in 1970. That includes
freshwater for our showers and toilets. It includes farm irrigation. It
also includes withdrawals of both fresh and saline water to cool our
fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.

The underlying data comes from a new report
by the US Geological Survey, which notes that water for power plants
(45 percent) and irrigation (33 percent) still made up most water
withdrawals in the US as of 2010. But use in both of those areas has
been declining over time.

More at Vox, including an explanation of "withdrawal" vs. "consumption."

24 March 2016

Cliteracy is an "art project that fuses street art, textiles and typography"
with the goal of educating the public about the clitoris.

"How do you film a conversation? Most likely, you’re going to block the
actors, set up the camera, and do shot/reverse shot. But where do you
put the camera? What lens do you use? And how do you cut back and forth?
Today, I consider the Coen brothers — Joel & Ethan — and see how
these choices lend a particular feel to their version of shot/reverse shot."

How to pronounce Godiva (as in the chocolates). You've been saying it wrong. Belgium's Prime Minister of Foreign Affairs explains the preferred pronunciation.

Kindertrauma is a website about "the movies, books, and toys that
scared you when you were a kid. It’s also about kids in scary movies,
both as heroes and villains. And everything else that’s traumatic to a
tyke!"

"MacWilliams studies authoritarianism — not actual dictators, but
rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is
characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who
score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for
strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect
them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
So MacWilliams naturally wondered if authoritarianism might correlate with support for Trump..."

"Phubbing" is phone-snubbing - paying more attention to one's phone than to one's partner.

There are different shades of black (resulting from reflectivity rather than admixture of other colors). Videos at the link demonstrate, and show the blackest material in the world ("Vantablack," made of carbon nanotubes).Five-story basements are causing problems in London. "A resident of Kensington Palace Gardens — the most pricey street in
Britain — Hunt planned a five-story basement to house a car museum, a
tennis court, an elevator, a swimming pool and a rotating Ferris wheel
for vehicles."

"In 1983, 90% of US media was controlled by fifty companies; today, 90% is controlled by just six companies." And two of those are owned by the same person. "Before passage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, a company could not
own more than 40 radio stations in the entire country. With the Act's
sweeping relaxation of ownership limits, Clear Channel now owns
approximately 1225 radio stations."

An article about Cliven Bundy and the plundering of the West. "... the BLM had begun to impound Bundy’s herd, which had been illegally
grazing on a 578,724-acre parcel of public land in the Mojave Desert
known as the Bunkerville Allotment of the Gold Butte range. The BLM
planned to sell the herd in order to reimburse the public for an
estimated $1.1 million in grazing fees and fines that Bundy owed. Bundy,
decrying federal tyranny and vowing to do whatever it took to protect
his rights to graze his cattle, called in the press to witness the start
of a “range war” on Gold Butte..." It's a long read, and not particularly uplifting.

A plagiarism scandal rocks the world of crossword puzzles. “When the same theme answers appear in the same order from one publication to the next, that makes you look closer,” Shortz tells Eli Rosenberg for the New York Times. “When they appear with the same clues, that looks suspicious. And when it happens repeatedly, then you know it’s plagiarism.”

"In the end, the oil attrition wars may lead us not into a future of
North American triumphalism, nor even to a more modest Saudi version of
the same, but into a strange new world in which an unlimited capacity to
produce oil meets an increasingly crippled capitalist system without
the capacity to absorb it."

Not too far from the Capitol Hill townhouses are the call centers
that both Democrats and Republicans use to dial for dollars. Endlessly.

This
is how Senator Dick Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, described it: “We sit
at these desks with stacks of names in front of us and short bios and
histories of giving . . . and we make calls to our faithful friends and
ask them to give money or host a fundraiser.”..

How much time do our elected representatives spend trying to collect
money from wealthy people? Roughly 50 percent. One former congressman,
Tom Perriello (D-VA), told reporter Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post
that even that may be “low-balling the figure so as not to scare the new
members too much.”

This feverish fundraising begins even before a
freshman gets sworn in. After former representative Walt Minnick, a
conservative Democrat from Iowa, won his first election to Congress in
2008, he took just five days off before heading back to the phones...

The sad truth is that given the frenetic search for money in federal congressional elections,

there
simply isn’t enough time in the day to stay competitive in campaign
finance and do the actual job of policy making . . . I remember when I
was first elected to Congress, I and many other House members would
often go down to the floor of the House of Representatives and just
listen to the debate. I may not have had an amendment to the bill or a
particular interest in the issue but I always felt that watching policy
discussions and witnessing the crafting of laws was an important part of
my day. It gave me the chance to educate myself and interact with
members of Congress on both sides of the aisle. Today most lawmakers
would tell you that any free moment not used raising dollars is time
wasted.

This theme of members of Congress not being
able to commit time to doing the increasingly complicated job of
examining and deeply understanding legislation comes up over and over
again. It’s not just driving them nuts, it’s also driving many of them
out of office, and it’s deterring good people from even thinking about
running...

Of course, not all the fundraising occurs in dreary call center cubicles
and trade-association-owned townhouses in D.C. As the New York
Times investigative reporter Eric Lipton chronicled in 2014,
“destination events” have become all the rage. Republicans join
lobbyists and business executives for spa weekends in Las Vegas and ski
trips at the Four Seasons resort in Vail. Democrats join lobbyists and
business executives on the Ritz-Carlton’s private beach in Puerto Rico
and on quail hunts in Georgia...

President Obama hasn’t exactly been a champion of reform, either.
Despite some of his strong rhetoric—for instance, his statement at a
White House press conference in 2013 that “There aren’t a lot of
functioning democracies around the world that work this way, where you
can basically have millionaires and billionaires bankrolling whoever
they want, however they want, in some cases undisclosed”—he has failed
to champion the cause. For instance, despite repeated requests from
Common Cause and more than fifty other organizations, President Obama
(as of the writing of this book) has been unwilling to sign an executive
order requiring that all companies receiving federal contracts disclose
their political spending...

We wish we could claim that coin-operated government exists only at the
national level. Sadly, that’s not the case. Just as the influence
industry has mushroomed in Washington in the last two decades, influence
peddlers and political operatives have sought new ways to accomplish
their agendas at the state and local levels...

An investigation by the Center for Public Integrity found that just
fifty individuals and organizations—from former New York City mayor
Michael Bloomberg to the Democratic Governors Association—steered $440
million to state candidates and parties in 2014. Eighty-five percent of
candidates who got donations from one of those fifty donors won.

Giving
directly to state candidates, who raked in $1.2 billion in 2011– 2012,
is often easier than giving to federal candidates, who can face tougher
donation limits. Six states allow limitless giving directly to
candidates, and another six have only slight restrictions. Data show
that in states like California, Georgia, and South Carolina, all of
which have high contribution limits, elections are less competitive. By
contrast, elections in Maine, Arizona, and Minnesota, all of which have
some form of public financing, are typically much more competitive...

Super PACs are also getting involved in city council and even school
board elections across the country. A super PAC called the Committee for
Economic Growth and Social Justice filed papers in Washington and
promptly sent more than $150,000, funded largely by the bail bond
industry, to unseat several members of a school board in Elizabeth, New
Jersey.

There's much more at Salon. I'm not sure I have the willpower to approach the book.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison holds an annual Cool Science Images contest, inviting campus researchers to submit interesting photos and videos.

"Using a pinhole camera made of an aluminum can, duct tape and
photosensitive paper and positioning the device atop Sterling Hall from
winter solstice to summer solstice, yields a symmetric chart of the
sun's path across the sky. The lowest arc was the sun's winter solstice
trajectory and the highest arc was the sun's path at summer solstice.
Gaps between the arcs are days of overcast weather.

I'm amazed that the paper isn't totally bleached-out during a six-month exposure. The sensitivity of the paper must be extremely low. Very cool.

The subsequent events, thanks to numerous books and the 1963 Hollywood epic The Great Escape,
have become the stuff of legend. However the real story had nothing to
do with Steve McQueen on a motorbike and over the top derring-do by a
few men – in reality some 600 were involved.

Despite being meticulously planned by the committee known as the X
Organisation, the escape was a far messier affair than we have
previously been led to believe. Events unfolded in chaos with numerous
hold-ups and tunnel collapses. Some pushed their way in line; others
fled their post altogether.

Now, after corresponding with and interviewing survivors, and seven
painstaking years of trawling through historical records in archives
across Europe, prisoner-of-war historian Charles Rollings throws new light on the night of the ‘Great Escape’.

TL:DR -

Two weeks later the remaining prisoners at Stalag Luft III receive news
that 42 of the recaptured escapees had been shot “resisting arrest or
making further escape attempts after arrest”. When the list of victims
was posted it amounted to 47 names, and a few days later another three
were added, bringing the total to 50. Among the dead were 25 Britons,
six Canadians, three Australians, two New Zealanders, three South
Africans, four Poles, two Norwegians, one Frenchman and a Greek. A
further 23 were sent back to various other Nazi prison camps. Only three
of the escapees - two Norwegians and a Dutchman - made it home.

21 March 2016

A pipe-fitter by trade, Tully was just an amateur collector, but a skilled one. He knew that the coal miners of Mazon Creek had discarded vast piles of shale that contained fossils galore. And as he sifted through the fragments, he found two rocks that had cracked open and that held something incredible between them...

Fifty years after Tully’s discovery, he and Richardson have both passed away, and the Tully Monster is the official state fossil of Illinois. And finally, a team of scientists led by Victoria McCoy at Yale University have solved the mystery of the strange beast, and assigned it a spot on the tree of life.
It turns out to be a close relative of modern lampreys... Its body is short and stout. Its eyes sit at the end of a rigid bar. And instead of the distinctive sucker, its mouth is a long, triple-jointed claw...

Why, for example, were Tullimonstrum’s eyes at the end of a rigid bar? “We think that the best comparison is to the hammerhead shark,” says McCoy. Their wide-set eyes give them exceptional binocular vision. “We think the eyebar allowed Tully monster to see the things it was grabbing with the mouth at the end of the proboscis.”
Oh yes. There’s that. Other scientists had interpreted that weird mouth as a flexible trunk. But since it usually had sharp bends in the same three places, McCoy’s team think it was jointed. It ended in a claw-like mouth, which contained two rows of teeth and could probably open and close. The mouth also contains something that looks like a tongue.
Perhaps the whole proboscis is an extremely extended version of the lamprey’s sucker. Lampreys stick to passing fish with their mouths and teeth, while rasping off bits of flesh with their tongues. Perhaps the Tully monster did the same, but at a distance. “It might have been a sort of protrusile, lamprey-like feeding apparatus, like the jawed tongue of the monster in Alien,” says Janvier.

An 80-thousand pound metaphor crashed through the ice in the
Northwest Territories Saturday in the form of an off-white Western Star
fuel tanker.

The CBC reports that the tanker was carrying heating fuel to Deline, a
town of about 500 near the Great Bear Lake. The accident happened just
three days after the territory’s transportation department raised the
allowable weight on the Great Bear Ice Crossing from 10,000 kilograms to
40,000.

The truck is currently semi-submerged in the top portion of the ice,
which one official estimates to be between 100 and 120 centimetres
thick. No one was injured in the incident.

The symbolism of a fuel truck trapped in the ice in Canada’s north
will not be lost on anyone who follows news from the scientific
community about climate change...

Goblinproofing One's Chicken Coop has been named as the winner of Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year.

The title won 38% of the public vote, fighting off competition from fellow contenders How Tea Cosies Changed the World and God's Doodle: The Life and Times of the Penis.

Although the winner receives no prize attention, the nominator of
the title, Deep Books' marketing manager Alan Ritchie, will receive a
bottle of wine.

Previous winners of the title have included Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, Highlights in the History of Concrete, Bombproof Your Horse and Cooking with Poo.

Philip Stone, The Bookseller charts editor and Diagram
Prize administrator, said: "People might think the Diagram Prize is just
a bit of fun, but it spotlights an undervalued art that can make or
break a work of literature. Books such as A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time all owe a sizeable part of their huge successes to their odd monikers."

The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones by Sandra Tsing-Loh (Norton), a memoir of the menopause

Where do Camels Belong? By Ken Thompson (Profile), an investigation into native and invasive species.

Divorcing a Real Witch: For Pagans and the People That Used to Love Them by Diana Rajchel (Moon Books), a practical guide for ending pagan relationships, an account of the author's experience of speaking to strangers.

The Ugly Wife is Treasured at Home by Melissa Margaret Schneider (Potomac), an expose of love and sex under Maoist rule in China.

One more item gleaned from The Phantom of the Opera (a pretty good book, but not an addition to this blog's category of recommended books).

I was startled to encounter (on pg 144 of my paperback copy) this sentence:

"If we really saw Erik, what I ought to have done was to nail him to Apollo's lyre, just as we nail the owls to the walls of our Breton farms; and there would have been no more question of him."

The reference to Apollo's lyre is to an ornament on the roof of the opera house. My puzzlement is to the indication that owls were once (19th century, apparently) nailed to farm walls. I would think most farmers would consider owls to be beneficial in terms of rodent control, so that act would not be appropriate as a triumph over a pest. Was it perhaps done on an outside wall rather than indoors, to frighten away other granivores (?birds)?

This blog has readers in Brittany. Perhaps one of you could inquire of an elderly grandparent...

Addendum: A tip of the blogging hat to reader Abie, who has found what appears to be the explanation (Google-translated from Chouette effraie):

The Barn is the basis of many legends and ghost stories.
Indeed, by its hiss, screeches, its ghostly flight and cavalcades in
the attic which serves as a cottage, lent credence to a spectral
presence. In the Middle Ages the owl was the symbol of heresy . It thus appears about 40 times in the works of Hieronymus Bosch which in Temptation of St. Anthony (it is painted on the character's head after St. Anthony).
The bad reputation of the "white lady" has earned him nailed to the
doors of the barns where she lived, a practice that was supposed to
protect thunderstorms, chase disease, ward off bad luck and scare other
owls. This bad reputation is evidenced by Buffon in 1780 who wrote about the Barn:

"It
grows sour different sounds all so unpleasant that this, together with
the idea of the vicinity of cemeteries and churches, and even in the
dark of night, inspires horror and fear to children, women, and even men
subject to the same prejudices and who believe in ghosts, sorcerers,
soothsayers to: they look like the funeral frightens bird, the messenger
of death;they
believe that when it is attached to a house, and that she sounds a
different voice of its common cry is to call someone at the cemetery " .

Mummified salamanders and piglets, enhanced with crystals, are now available for purchase at DeviantArt as curiosities or fashion accessories.

When I was a child growing up in Minnesota, tiger salamanders
by the dozens would accumulate at the base of our outside basement
stairwell. It was my not unpleasant chore to gather them
up before they desiccated, and transfer them back to the nearby woods. Little did I know that I was dealing with potential art.

Found while re-reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. I find it interesting that Sara Teasdale gave voice to this postapocalyptic scenario twenty-five years before the invention of nuclear weapons.

11 March 2016

A stone path running
alongside Morskie Oko, a Polish lake located high in the Tatra
Mountains.

The name "Morskie Oko" ("Sea Eye", "Eye of the Sea") is derived from an
old legend, according to which the lake was connected to the sea via an
underground passage... Morskie Oko is one of the most popular destinations in the Tatras, often
receiving over 50,000 visitors during the vacation season. It is
reached by foot in about two hours from the nearest road that allows
motorized access.

The toboggan run is located at the top station of the cable car Oeschinensee. To get there, take the cable car (about 8 minutes) from Kandersteg to Oeschinen. Alternatively, can be reached via the trail to the toboggan run. The walk takes 1.5 hours.

09 March 2016

"Then she ran into the garden and took refuge on a bench, a prey to feelings that stirred her young heart for the first time. Raoul followed her and they talked until evening, very shyly. They were quite changed, were as cautious as two pildomatists and told each other things that had nothing to do with their budding sentiments."

--- Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera, Chapter V.

This morning I encountered a mystery word. I couldn't find "pildomatist" in my Random House Dictionary, or even in my OED. More than that, there were no "pild..." words to which it might be related, both dictionaries leaping from "pilc..." to "pile."

The mystery deepened when a Google search turned up nothing except a few references to this same passage in The Phantom of the Opera.

Since the author was French, I found an online French dictionary, but it also had no pild... words. One possible explanation was "if the word is spelled correctly, I'd guess that it had Latin origins
pil doma tist. pil: to gather, to pillage, to plunder, to rob, to steal, to snatch, to heap up (as stones) and to carry off. doma: home" (implying that a pildomatist is a house burglar, which would be consistent with the context). But that didn't explain its absence from dictionaries.

Perhaps it's simply a typo that has been carried forward through various editions of the book (my copy was Dorset Press, 1985).

Or an error by an early translator of the work.

Or a neologism by the author based on some slang used in 1911.

I'll turn this over to the unparalleled knowledge base of the readers of this blog, some of whom undoubtedly have obscure dictionaries and arcane knowledge of various languages.

Addendum: We already have a presumptive correct answer in the Comments, but ponder the problem before peeking. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly questions/problems get solved here.

The state system, which predates the national system, includes 75 state parks and more than 600 miles of paved trails. Over the past 60 years, the annual number of visitors has increased from about 1 million to more than 8 million. And in 2015, nearly half a million people bought daily and annual permits.
DNR officials point to the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment — which provides funding for parks and trails through a statewide sales tax — as the reason behind the recent rise in visitor numbers. Since the amendment passed in 2008, sales of daily and annual parks permits have risen by nearly 150,000.

The Puente Nuevo ("New Bridge") is the newest and largest of three bridges that span the 120-metre (390 ft)-deep chasm that carries the Guadalevín River and divides the city of Ronda, in southern Spain...

The bridge was started in 1751 and took 42 years to build. Fifty workers were killed during its construction. There is a chamber above the central arch that was used for a variety of purposes, including as a prison. During the 1936-1939 civil war both sides allegedly used the prison as a torture chamber for captured opponents, killing some by throwing them from the windows to the rocks at the bottom of the El Tajo gorge...

My eye was drawn to the horizontal cleft in the rock on the right. I would love for that to be a pathway carved in ancient times by humans, but I suppose it's probably just a natural cleft.

This stunning election result will make a difference in Iran's engagement with the wider world.
President Rouhani's hand has been strengthened in parliament to help open his country to greater trade and investment. That will help him, and others in his reformist camp, to deepen the dialogue with the West, which began with negotiations on a landmark nuclear deal.
But much of this opening will continue to be with Europe, rather than the US. Iran's relationship with America is still complex and controversial. ..

Voting was extended three times on Friday as crowds reportedly flocked to polling stations. Turnout was more than 60%.
Reformists, who want better relations with the outside world and more freedoms at home, were hoping to gain influence in the conservative-dominated bodies...

Observing my gaze upon the magnificent textiles, Anita drew out a richly-embellished cope from Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. ‘This is cloth of gold’ she indicated, changing her voice to whisper, ‘it ceased production years ago.’

‘There are still wonderful haberdashers in Kuala Lumpur and Aleppo,’ she informed me as if it were a closely-guarded secret, ‘I
found this place there that still sold gold thread. If someone’s going
to Marrakesh, we give them a shopping list in case they stumble upon a
traditional haberdashery.’ Next, Anita produced a sombre cope from
Winston Churchill’s funeral, fashioned from an inky black brocade
embroidered with silver trim, permitting my eye to accommodate to the
subtler tones that can be outshone by tinsel.

In this lofty chamber high above the chaos of the city, an atmosphere
of repose prevails in which these needlewomen pursue their exemplary
work in a manner unchanged over millennia. I was in awe at their skill
and their devotion to their art but Anita said,‘As embroiderers, we are thankful to have a purpose for our embroidery because there’s only so many cushions you can do.’

More details (and photos) at Spitalfields Life. And today I learn that a person who embroiders can be called a "broderer."

Every time I see a d20, my thoughts go back to some awesome dungeon encounters in a friend's basement in Lexington, Kentucky decades ago. But today, the die is used for a math puzzle:

We play a game. You roll the die, and can elect to bank [that number of $], or roll again.
If you bank, you walk away with the dollar amount shown on the die, and
the game ends. If you elect to re-roll, it costs you $1 for each new
roll. You can re-roll as often as you like. (Your first roll is free)...

It's pretty clear that if we rolled a natural 20 at any time, we'd
instantly stop; We're never going to get better. It's not a stretch to
see that, if we rolled a 19, we'd also stop; The only number that could
beat a 19 is a 20, and we'd have to pay an additional $1 just for the
privelage of rolling to see about getting it. Even if we did roll a 20
(a small chance), we'd net out with no gain, so why bother? For 18,
it's less clear; we have a one chance of breaking evening, one chance of
improving, and lots of chances of losing more, if we rolled again.

From a lengthy and very interesting (if you like math) post at DataGenetics:

I was able to find almost 3.4 million four digit passwords. Every single one of the of the 10,000 combinations of digits from 0000 through to 9999 were represented in the dataset.
The most popular password is 1234 - it’s staggering how popular this password appears to be. Utterly staggering at the lack of imagination - nearly 11% of the 3.4 million passwords are 1234 !!!

The next most popular 4-digit PIN in use is 1111 with over 6% of passwords being this.
In third place is 0000 with almost 2%.
A table of the top 20 found passwords in shown [at the link]. A staggering 26.83% of all passwords could be guessed by attempting these 20 combinations! ...

Looking more closely at the top few records, all the usual suspects are present 1111 2222 3333 … 9999 as well as 1212 and (snigger) 6969 .

It’s not a surprise to see patterns like 1122 and 1313 occurring high up in the list, nor 4321 or 1010 .
2001 makes an appearance at #19. 1984 follows not far behind in position #26, and James Bond fans may be interested to know 0007 is found between the two of them in position #23 (another variant 0070 follows not much further behind at #28).

The first “puzzling” password I encountered was 2580 in position #22. What is the significance of these digits? Why should so many people select this code to make it appear so high up the list?

The answer to that last query is at the link, along with much more info.

The theme of the program was an exploration of the ways people's personalities/personas change when they enter cyberspace. The first act was "Ask Not For Whom The Bell Trolls; It Trolls for Thee," with obvious subject matter. Then one on hate e-mail directed toward the program because of narrators having "vocal fry."

Act Three was "Words of Prey" -

"Jeffrey Brodeur worked at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and was put in charge of an
Osprey Cam — a live web feed of an osprey nest near his office. Which he thought was just
charming — until the mother osprey in the nest began acting strangely."

The mother abused and frankly attacked the chicks, and the internet "blew up" with demands from "featherheads" (bird lovers) for someone to rescue the chicks. I won't tell the outcome here. Rather I'll just share this comment...

"Nature is not cruel - that implies intent. It is harsh, unforgiving, and often random."

A sculpture made from sofas abandoned on the streets of Edinburgh, Scotland, has won a £10,000 art prize.
Edinburgh College of Art graduate Emily Binks won the award for a shelter she created from discarded furniture.
She will be provided with a house and studio for three months and a monthly stipend as part of the Glenfiddich Residency Award.

Ms Binks, who is originally from West Yorkshire, will also be given a budget to create new works... "I have been re-homing discarded pieces of furniture from around
Edinburgh, then combining that with my experiences of being a Scout
leader and my knowledge of survival skills...

The piece was chosen from 61 artists on show at the RSA New Contemporaries exhibition which opened in Edinburgh on Saturday...

"Tai-wiki-widbee" is an eclectic mix of trivialities, ephemera, curiosities, and exotica with a smattering of current events, social commentary, science, history, English language and literature, videos, and humor. We try to be the cyberequivalent of a Victorian cabinet of curiosities.

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I'm using an old photo of my grandfather as an avatar; he would have been amused.
Old friends, classmates, students, former colleagues, or distant relatives are welcome to email me via retag4726 (at) mypacks.net